Monthly Archives: October 2012

Hello everyone! We spent this past weekend winterizing our Tiny House in reaction to the really cold weather we’ve been having here in Santa Fe. In the 20’s at night…. Brrr! Now it’s back up into the 70’s, which is nice, but we still needed to get set up for winter, which is different in a tiny house.

Hook up our propane Newport heater

Insulate our graywater tank and hose located under the trailer

Install wind-block and insulation skirting under the trailer foundation

fix the heat tape at our water supply hose (we had used some heat tape we found from an old trailer but turns out it didn’t work – we found this out when our water froze!)

Our propane heater:

we already had propane plumbed near the heater but we just needed to hook up the connection line with a shut off valve.

Money is only ONE of the reasons we decided to live in a tiny house (check out the FAQ page for more reasons) but I thought I would write a series about Why Tiny? and I’ll start with economics, because that seems to be the most urgent motivator for most people. (excepting maybe No Impact Man…? his motivation seemed to be a desire to make his wife miserable! oh, wait, saving the environment.)

So. We got iPhones. I know, I know, I am a technology phobe and resisted getting a “smart” phone for so long, but at last, I’ve made the plunge. And I am slightly embarrassed to admit that I LOVE it! Like way more than anyone should love a … phone. Haha! It is so compact and beautifully designed and simple to use. Anyway, I have a new app and wanted to share some tiny vignettes of this morning with you. Now I can turn all of my photos into 1970’s house-fire survivors too!!

I was reminded today of one of my favorite poems and thought I would share it with you all as inspiration:

“You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
call to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting –
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”

(sorry I can’t embed the video directly, but if you click the link above it will take you to the video tour and article)

they also wrote an article about the mortgage crisis and Tiny House living: click here.

Shane was live (via phone…) on the show “Making It In America” today at 4pm ET and I’ll share the link with you when HLN posts it on their website.

Also, we watched a really great movie last night: Surviving Progress. (with appearances from Stephen Hawking, Jane Goodall, David Suzuki, Margaret Atwood, and No Impact Man.) It really encouraged us that we ARE on the right path with living differently, living simply, and living smaller. Props to everyone else who is trying to make a change and treat our home planet with care and respect. It’s not easy to change the way we are used to living, but it is paramount that we all do so.

wanted to let you know we’ll be featured on a television show tomorrow afternoon: HLNtv’s Making It In America. It airs at 4pm ET and we did some fresh video tours of the house and we’ll be doing a live interview too! I’ll let you know how that goes…. :)

I’ll post a link to it once it’s on their website too.

Here are a few photos I took during when a thunderstorm was blowing over our area…

just a quick blog to say that it was 25 degrees outside this morning… and 47 degrees inside! It probably would have been warmer, but I accidentally left a window cracked and we had been gone for two days. it’s definitely time to start winterizing our house.

TO DO:

hook up our Newport propane heater

buy insulated window blinds (we’re looking at white cellular shades)

place straw bales under the perimeter of the house

plug in the heat tape at the hose supplying our house water (this was a freebie we got from Shane’s dad that he pulled off of a used camper trailer)

It’s warmed up nicely in just two hours with a small space heater though. And at night, who needs heat when you have a down comforter and a puppy?! (Shane’s out of town…)

I came across an interesting article about toilets and thought I would share it with you all, as toilets seem to be a favorite topic of discussion among tiny housers. Click HERE to read the Fast Company article about Bill Gates’ sponsored toilet inventions around the world. One submittal:

China’s toilet submission. Not sure where you sit. Looks dangerous…

My fave was China’s toilet design submission that “extracts and disposes fecal sludge on-site”. Not to pick on the Chinese… but c’mon, do I really want to dump fecal sludge outside my home? I’m sure there’s some way to make it “odorless” right? … but I have no trust for systems claiming to be odorless, as that has been our main complaint with our Incinolet incinerating toilet.

Categories

Our Tiny House

building the dream.

Why Tiny? Clothesline Tiny Homes will strive to have a small footprint on our natural environment, will allow us to live wherever we want, paying much less money for rent / mortgage and utilities, and will be a fun adventure where we can grow and learn to live with less stuff and enjoy our beautiful world much more!

We started designing it in February of 2012, bought the trailer platform February 25th, and started building February 27th.

2-1/2 months later we finished building and moved into our tiny house mid-May 2012 and lived in it full time through November 2013.

After 18 months we decided it was too small, and would make a better guest house! So now we are building a small house (1,000 SF) DEBT FREE in Southern Colorado, where the tiny house will be a lovely guest cottage.

We both have years of experience designing and building but we thought the best way to learn about the intricacies of a Tiny House would be to design and build one for ourselves.